MartianIceQueen's Utterly Vague Ham and Lentil Soup with Smoked Paprika Recipe

Okay, this is also in the running for best recipe title ever. Thanks, Martian, for indulging my whiny gluttony. It sounds delicious!

So, I had gotten ham the previous week, and had all this leftover ham. In my family, you get a ham with the bone in, and you simmer it in water for a while to heat it up and get some of the saltiness out (no baking, no cloves, no honey glaze or whatever). Then you have leftovers until you cannot stand ham anymore. Yesterday there was a huge rainstorm, so it seemed like a good soup day. I was working from home, and I decided to try and put something together with what I had on hand, since there was no chance of me leaving the house and driving with the crazy people who seem to hit the freeways in Los Angeles on days like that.

I chopped the large, good hunks of meat off the bone, but wasn't too meticulous about it – there was still meat left on it. I put that in my biggest soup pot and put enough water in to just about cover the bone. I don't really know how much that was, but it was a lot – emptied my Brita pitcher. I added a bag of lentils (the generic kind you get from the grocery store) and two bay leaves, and left it at just under a simmer for about 3 hours.

Then I added one and a half chopped onions (what I had – one red and half a white) and 6 or so large carrots, chopped. Also a bunch of fresh thyme, spices from Penzeys (minced garlic, toasted onion, smoked Spanish paprika, Ancho chili powder, celery seed), salt and pepper. Half an hour later I added more smoked paprika and a few more pinches of celery seed as well as regular Hungarian sweet paprika (also from Penzeys) and some roasted garlic chips from Trader Joe's. I then diced the leftover ham (approximately 1-inch chunks), and then removed the ham bone and added the ham. I fished out the thyme sprigs and the bay leaves, and then added more of both types of paprika. Basically I just kept tasting and adding more spices until I liked it. All spices were added by the "pour some amount into your hand and then toss it in" method of measurement, so I don't actually know how much I used.

This made like a gazillion servings. I hope it freezes well.